


Duality

by eve11



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-01
Updated: 2014-07-01
Packaged: 2018-02-07 00:39:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1878465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eve11/pseuds/eve11
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You can't undo a strand in the web.  You can only add more.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Duality

**

Time is malleable, relative, and non-linear. Time can be rewritten. It cannot be erased. You can't undo a strand in the web. He knows this. You can only add more.

**

The TARDIS still mourns Gallifrey's loss. She remembers that the Moment . . . the terrible moment . . . has not truly been erased from the fabric of everything. It is not locked away like the war, like her birth planet's past and inevitable future. It is both and always has been. 

Two modes exist in the landscape of the continuum. Her events are bifurcated and the probability streams mingle like twisting helixes. 

The Doctor destroys Gallifrey, and the Doctor saves Gallifrey.

The link between them is the solitary timeline that joins them, the perspective of her Pilot. The full weight of it is crushing. Forgetting is a defense mechanism, an interleaving, a snap of the time stream. The Doctor destroys Gallifrey, so he can become the man who saves her. 

**

He never seems to sleep anymore. Once, Clara finds him in the tiny TARDIS kitchen, slouched in a chair at the table, eyes fixed on a penny lying flat. 

She leans against the door frame, but he doesn't look up. "Suppose you look at this coin," he says. "What do you know?"

"I don't understand."

"It has a picture, a face. Suppose I tell you I can change that." He snatches the coin and flicks it upward with his thumb, watching it spin. 

"Flip the coin but don't look at it." He catches it in a fist in the air. The veins stand out on the back of his hand. "Now, what do you know?"

She pauses. "It--if it lands on the table again, it could be . . ."

He huffs a breath and gives a joyless smile. 

"There are no 'ifs'." He stands abruptly, pockets the coin, and walks away.

**

He had thought it would be like escaping the fixed point. But he didn't need to cross his timeline to do that. That was only a bit of foreknowledge. This though, this is retro-activity, and it's totally different. 

The timelines have to interleave, but he only remembers one. His perspective is the bridge between the modes. His history is the potential that keeps the coin spinning in the air. And spin it does. The fabric of Time is not smoothed by sleight of hand or parlour tricks.

He has a new respect for Kazran Sardick, and guilt for what he did to him.

And now, in the aftermath of this duality, he relives the time war. Everything he thought he'd moved on from. Everything he thought he'd changed. He destroyed Gallifrey. Nothing changes that, even if it's only the time sensitive who can feel the interleaving, the potential of the paradox. It was said that Gallifrey had been preparing for the Time War for all of its days. And how else to make the paradox go smoothly than to spend all of your days in noninterference?

He doesn't want to sleep. Clara finds him pacing the corridors of the TARDIS, tapping a finger against her endless walls with every step.

"What are you doing?" she asks him.

If he ever does find his people again, they will feel the spin of the coin. They will remember being spirited away. But they will also remember burning. 

"Doctor? What--?"

"Counting." He shuffles on. Tap. Tap. Tap. 

Clara takes one look at his face, and leaves him to it.

**


End file.
